Sunday, April 24, 2005

I Don't Follow the Logic

This writer seems to be saying that if you are going to morally degrade yourself anyway, you may as well go whole hog and take advantage of all the other ways you can break the law in order to have the safest experience possible.

When the sexual act occurs outside of marriage (especially where there is no intimacy such as in a case where a women exchanges the use of her body for money), the unitive aspect of the coupling is absent. In these situations, the degradation of self - the giving of a body as an object for the pleasure of another - has already taken place. Does it add anything to the degradation to use a condom for protection against a) the disease of HIV/AIDS or b) the procreative aspects of sexual union, since the unitive and procreative are inherently conjoined?

[...]

[I]t seems to me that the Church is right to teach abstinence - that the sexual union ought to take place within marriage. Since this is the Truth revealed in our Tradition, what else can it teach? But, given the real world reality of non-marital sex with grave consequences, could the Church, consistent with its theology, support (or at least not condemn) condom use in these situations. Here, given my analysis above, the answer is yes.

An analog to this logic, would be like saying if we're going to have criminals robbing banks with firearms, we should supply them with illegal bullet proof vests in case the inevitable shoot-out with the police occurs, just to lessen the chances of anyone getting hurt. Of course, the best course of action would be to try to preempt the robbery from occuring in the first place by making a law criminalizing bank robberies, then publishing the law so that everyone is on notice that it's a criminal act. Then, to further discourage robberies, when they occur the perpetrators should be vigorously prosecuted. Making it safer for the person to engage in the act that is wrong, particularly through the encouraged use of illegal equipment, is not the way to discourage its happening in the first place.

Likewise, the church should not be expected to encourage the committing of acts it believes are wrong (sex outside of marriage) by lessening the consequences (contraction of HIV/AIDS) of such activities through distribution of devices the church also is morally opposed to (condoms).

3 Comments:

Mike C. says he did not follow my logic. As I said in my post at mirrorofjustice.com, I stand to be corrected if my logic is faulty. But, I think in this case, Mike C. has not understood my argument. I attempted to answer a "could" question. "Could" the Church condone or at least not condemn condom use in these limited situations. And, here I answered in the affirmative for the reasons given in my post, which are partially reproduced above.

Mike C. takes my "could" statement and transforms it into a "should," suggesting that I argue that the Church should condone condom use to prevent HIV/AIDS where the individuals have already made the choice to engage in sex. This was precisely the question I left open. I did not argue that the Church should condone this course of action, only that from a moral standpoint the Church could condone (or at least not condemn) it. In short, I argue that it is a question of prudential judgment. I suspect that the reasons the Church has not condoned or at least not condemned condom use is that it thinks that such a signal would be imprudent for all the reasons Mike C. gives.